1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing system which reads and processes a plurality of originals by distributing them to a plurality of image reading apparatuses connected to each other via a network, and a control method of the system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The trend of digitization of paper documents and paperless trend using image reading apparatuses (scanners) have been growing in offices and homes. An increase in storage capacity that can store image data and the like seems to be one of the causes of such trends. There will be an increasing tendency toward reading large quantities of originals. It takes too much time for one scanner to read large quantities of originals. It is therefore conceivable to quicken the processing of reading these originals by distributing the original read processing to a plurality of scanners and concurrently performing the processing.
In such a conventional distributed/concurrent scanning method, image data read by different image reading apparatuses are temporarily collected in one of the image reading apparatuses or a server. This image reading apparatus or server then combines the data into one file and transmits it to a designated transmission destination (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-033879 (FIG. 10) and Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-176191).
According to the above conventional technique, however, one image reading apparatus or server collects image data, combines the data into one file, and then transmits the combined file to a transmission destination. This increases the load on the network.